Exclusive: Viz Hosts Signing Tour for GalaXic Baseball League Comic Artist Acky Bright
Viz Media announced on Wednesday a signing tour across the United States for the GalaXic Baseball League comic series — Viz's collaboration with MLB Players, Inc., OneTeam Partners, and the BW NYC Studios of Japanese artist Acky Bright. The tour will start on October 13, the release date of the comic's first volume. The ticketed signing events will feature artist Acky Bright at Kinokuniya bookstores in New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Attendees will also receive a special poster of the comic series.
Detailed schedules of the event are as follows:
- New York: October 13 - 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
- Chicago: October 14 - 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
- Seattle: October 16 - 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
- San Francisco: October 17 - 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
- Los Angeles (Little Tokyo): October 18 - 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
- Los Angeles (Santa Anita): October 18 - 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
The GalaXic Baseball League series launched exclusively on the Viz Manga app on July 2.
Viz describes the comic's story:
In the distant future, baseball has rocketed into the cosmos. What was once America's pastime is now a high-stakes interplanetary competition in which teams from every corner of the universe battle for glory. Amid a sinister plot to wreak havoc on the galaxy, legendary baseball players team up with two unlikely heroes in their quest to save Earth – and the heart and soul of baseball.
Viz credits Acky Bright with the story for what it describes as the first such IP that includes active baseball players. The artist cites the 2023 World Baseball Classic final as the inspiration for the project. The series features baseball stars Shohei Ohtani (Los Angeles Dodgers), Yoshinobu Yamamoto (Los Angeles Dodgers), Aaron Judge (New York Yankees), Fernando Tatis Jr. (San Diego Padres), Jazz Chisholm Jr. (New York Yankees), Kyle Schwarber (Philadelphia Phillies), Paul Skenes (Pittsburgh Pirates), and more.
Acky Bright is a Japanese visual artist who has worked on projects for DC Comics and Marvel from his studios, including one in New York. He founded the design studio Brightworks in 2002. He was one among six artists chosen by Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli to demonstrate Japanese art to travelers to Japan. The Narita and Haneda Airports installed his manga-style video starting from February 2021. Acky Bright has designed merchandise for Hasbro's Transformers franchise. He has collaborated with BMW of Germany on the title Heroes of Rivalry featuring e-sports teams Cloud 9, FNATIC, FunPlus Phoenix, G2 Esports, T1, and OG Esports. More recently, Acky Bright drew the illustrations for a limited-time campaign for WcDonald's.
MLB Players is the business arm of the Major League Baseball Players Association, which represents all professional baseball players of the 30 Major League Baseball teams in collective bargaining and licensing. OneTeam Partners is a joint venture of the NFL Players Association, MLB Players Association, Women's National Basketball Players Association, MLS Players Association, and U.S. Women's National Team Players Association for sports licensing, marketing, sponsorship, and media.
Source: Press release
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.